172 Dr Morton on the Distinctive Characters of the 
of America from ‘“ the Cuthites who built the monuments of 
Egypt and Indostan.” He supposes them to have traversed 
all Asia to reach Behring’s strait, and thus to have entered 
America at its northwest angle, whence they made their way, 
by slow journeys, to the central regions of the continent. Our 
objections to this theory will be found in what has been 
already stated ; and we may merely add, that the route by 
which the author conducts his pilgrim adventurers appears 
to constitute the least plausible portion of his theory. Mr 
Delafield supposes the barbarous tribes to be of a different 
stock, and refers them to the Mongolians of Asia; thus 
adopting the idea of a plurality of races. 
We shall lastly notice an imaginative classification which 
separates the aborigines of America into four species of men, 
exclusive of the Esquimaux. This curious but unphilosophi- 
cal hypothesis has been advanced by M. Bory de St Vincent, 
a French naturalist of distinction, who considers the civilized 
nations to be cognate with the Malays, and designates them 
by the collective name of the Neptunian species ; while to 
his three remaining species,—the Columbian, the American, 
and the Patagonian, he assigns certain vague geographical 
limits, without establishing any distinctive characteristics of 
the people themselves. The system is so devoid of founda- 
tion in nature, so fanciful in all its details, as hardly to merit 
a serious analysis ; and we have introduced it on the present 
oceasion to illustrate the extravagance and the poverty of 
some of the hypotheses which have been resorted to in ex- 
planation of the problem before us. 
Once for all I repeat my conviction, that the study of phy- 
sical conformation alone excludes every branch of the Cau- 
casian race from any obvious participation in the peopling of 
this continent. If the Egyptians, Hindoos, Pheenicians, or 
Gauls, have ever, by accident or design, planted colonies in 
America, these must have been, sooner or later, dispersed and 
lost in the waves of a vast indigenous population. Such we 
know to have been the fact with the Northmen, whose re- 
peated, though very partial, settlements in the present New 
England States, from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, 
